St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0

Word count: 283K words
Chapters: 29

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Jan 14, 2006

Editor's review

This is the collected volume 5 (November 1877 to November 1878) of the nineteenth-century American children's magazine St. Nicholas Magazine, with contributions from many authors and covering stories, poems, popular science, historical anecdotes, and puzzles. It is both a specimen of Victorian children's reading and a window onto the educational tastes, language style, and illustrated-text traditions of the time. For those studying the history of children's literature, the history of English reading, or nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture, this volume offers a wealth of primary texts, and its short pieces make it easy to dip into. The language bears the marks of its era, and some of the knowledge background is now outdated; read it with a historical eye, as cultural source material and English extensive-reading material, rather than recommending it directly to children as a contemporary children's book.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers studying nineteenth-century children's literature and Anglo-American cultural history
Intermediate to advanced English learners who want to use original English short pieces for extensive reading practice
Collectors interested in Victorian magazine columns and styles
Teachers who need historical primary texts as teaching material

Not a good fit for

Young children, for whom both the language and the knowledge background are unsuitable for direct reading
Ordinary parents expecting contemporary children's stories or illustrated picture books
Beginner English readers, for whom the period vocabulary and long sentences would cause comprehension difficulties

Reading tips

Read by column or piece in a jumping-around fashion; there is no need to read straight through from beginning to end.
When a piece's historical background is unclear, look up the author and the publication context before reading.
Treat the short pieces as English extensive-reading material, and after each piece note down new words and period vocabulary.
For research, compare with children's periodicals of the same period to observe differences in column arrangement.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this magazine suitable for children to read?

This is an original nineteenth-century magazine; both its language and its knowledge background bear the marks of the era, and some content no longer suits contemporary children's reading habits. It is better suited to adult researchers or intermediate-to-advanced English readers; reading it to children requires adult selection and explanation.

Does it contain only stories?

No. The magazine had diverse columns; besides fiction and stories, there are poems, popular science, historical anecdotes, and puzzles, and the collected volume presents the comprehensive character of children's periodicals of the time.

How difficult is the English?

Overall it is nineteenth-century written English, with longer sentences and older vocabulary, posing some difficulty for contemporary readers. Intermediate-to-advanced English learners can use a dictionary for extensive reading, but beginners should not start with it directly.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.